Freshly packed Mermaid (Patreon)

More iPad practice. This time, featuring WagglingMermaid’s Rae getting sealed away for some nefarious purpose. Don’t worry, she’s into this kind of stuff, AND its quite comfortable! (if you’re into that kind of thing).

What’s fun is that this drawing helped me get over a hurdle I keep worrying about in illustration programs. Most animation programs have a “margin” functionality, which ensures you can draw beyond the canvas if you need to, for environments. For some reason, this is not a default in illustration programs. I think that has to do with most animation programs being vector programs (your strokes are a series of mathematical calculations based on angles) while most illustration programs are raster-based (you’re basically staining a series of pixels in a way that resembles graphite staining paper), because Adobe Illustrator and Inkscape also have this functionality.

Either way, drawing in a drawing app always gives me anxiety because I want to “draw everything” and then crop it how I like. Even my comics follow this rule, because the panels have a margin to draw into/around.

However, when I got to the end of drawing Rae on the table, it looked... empty. Sure, I could have left it like that, but I hate doing that, so I drew in another table (to imply this was a systemic process), gave the background tiled bricks (to imply that this was a dungeon or basement, or somewhere a little forboding), and then the dialogue (because I like gag noises, and playing up the peril with some vague ominous statements)

I’m really loving this app, though, admittedly, for some reason, the linework was (or rather, “felt”) a lot crisper when I was working, and feels a little blurrier now that I’m not working on it. I think that’s because I was zoomed out, and working in poor lighting conditions (I was relaxing after work on my bed). I think the solution there is both working at a higher resolution, with a crisper pen, as well as zooming in to check the linework on occasion.

In chatting with Wags, I may pivot suggestions in this direction, if that’s cool with my $10 patrons. It makes jumping in and drawing really easy and fun (in a way that I can’t do with either my desktop or my shop-ridden laptop), and that’s something I want for my suggestions, because I like doing them; but I also overdo them to the point where they become work. I think this will become my new sketchbook, and if I can keep up the quality, ease of doodles, and introduce color, we’ll have something special.

Also, like the last post, this image has a speedpaint, because the app automatically saves all your process steps. Unfortunately, because I’m uploading this from the iPad, I can’t attach it to this post (because the iPad is not a computer, and that sucks), but you can check it out on Discord in the “Saunter-Art-Share” channel of the Patreon/Subscribestar folder. If you link your Discord to your Patreon, you automatically get access to any Discord servers you are a patron of, and I tend to do a lot more community chatting there.

Lemme know whatcha think, and I’ll catcha over yonder!

-Saunter!